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Random Arduino experiments

Right now, I have no Arduino projects planned. I’ve been trying to stay on track with school, but I find that the breaks I take are getting less productive. Even when I was in full-time school, I’d be doing electronics-related things (or web design projects) in my free time on the weekend. I’d really like to have at least something ready to go for Halloween but it doesn’t look like that will happen. I decided to play around and go with whatever comes to mind so here are a couple of things I did last night.

I bought the Arduino Mega so that I could make use of it’s 50+ pins. There are other ways to get more out of your Arduino, especially those with the Uno and others that have less pins. One way is to create an array and use a technique called multiplexing. The anodes can be connected together in rows while the cathodes are connected in columns. You can then “address” each LED by configuring the right row and column so that there is a potential difference across the LED (as in the anode is HIGH while the cathode is LOW/ground). I learned this stuff in school using ICs and development platforms so it took me a while to wire it and get it going. I didn’t even bother to figure out how to program it but hopefully I understand the concept correctly again. I’ll stick to the Arduino Mega for any project that requires that many pins (usually my light shows), it’s just easier that way.

The second experiment were a couple of drive tires. I’ve been inching to create a ride model but everything seems too complicated. I could go for a very simple swing ride, though. It’s just hard to get started. Anyways, here’s a gif of those drive tires…

That’s all I’ve got. Hopefully there’s something more interesting for the next post. Thanks for reading!